What
Comes Around!
"What goes around, comes
around" is one of those sayings to suggest that every
dog has his day, or that good guys sometimes win in
the end. The event I have in mind is the announcement
the end of August that Bishop Demetrios Traketellis of
Greece is just named the new Archbishop of the Greek
Orthodox Church of North America. In the case of
Bishop Demetrios, this is a case of a good guy, a good
bishop, finally having his day.
I first met Demetrios in l972
in Athens. He was just about the best educated and
most ecumenically inclined of all the bishops. Liberal
in spirit and democratic in political outlook, he was
anathema to the military junta which governed Greece
at that time. He was a risk for the Patriarch who
probably respected Demetrios and knew he was needed to
modernize the church but who did not know how to use
his talents in a climate that was hostile to every
progressive outlook. So Demetrios was given an
honorary title, Bishop of Vresthene which was once a
thriving area in Turkey but which ceased to have any
parishioners with the mass exodus of the Greeks from
Turkey after WWI.
So Demetrios was a bishop
without either pastoral or episcopal duties. This
freed him to pursue a teaching career at Harvard
Divinity School and the Orthodox Seminary at
Brookline, Mass, all through the 70s and 80s. Through
the years I kept only occasional contact with
Demetrios, meeting him once in Boston and several
times in Greece where we were both on holiday., most
recently talking to him August of l998 when I was on
holiday in Athens.
Two years ago when the late
Archbishop of Greece, Seraphim, had died, Demetrios
was a runner-up in the election among the Greek
bishops. My Greek friends thought that Demetrios
should have then been elected but that approaching 70,
he was a bit too old; he also may have still been too
liberal for Greece. And now, ironically, at 7l he has
been named to lead the wealthiest Greek Church in the
world, the l.5 million member Greek Orthodox Church of
the Americas.
The circumstance of
Demetrios' elevation from retirement are cruelly
ironic. Two years ago the aged Archbishop Iakovos was
forced to retire at 86. The Patriarch named a very
young and U.S. born bishop, Spyridon, to replace him
and everyone assumed a new, progressive era was
beginning for the American Church which is no longer a
church of immigrants. The opposite proved the case.
Spyridon was apparently aggressively authoritarian and
stubborn and ended up alienating just about everybody
in American Orthodoxy. A veritable civil war was waged
against Spyridon by leading laity and most of the
hierarchy, all five senior metropolitans opposing his
rule. And finally the Patriarch acted by recalling him
to Turkey, accepted his resignation, and appointed
Demetrios.
I know Demetrios as a
honorable, humble, intellectually brilliant, and
democratic leader. He will be a blessing to his
church. What goes around, comes around and after many
years a good bishop has received his just
recognition.
Pastor Gene Preston